By Dana Ullman at Brownstone dot org.

Harris Coulter has written an academic and fascinating four-volume set of books on the history of Western Medicine, brought back into print by Brownstone Institute:

Volume I: The Patterns Emerge: Hippocrates to Paracelsus

Volume II: Progress and Regress: J.B. Van Helmont to Claude Bernard

Volume III: Science and Ethics in American Medicine: 1800-1914

Volume IV, Part One: Twentieth-Century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era

Volume IV, Part Two: Twentieth-Century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era

Each volume is important to those who wish to understand the roots of modern medicine and to learn how and why many "unorthodox" practices did not gain general acceptance in the health care system. The four books are of particular importance to those involved in holistic approaches to health because Coulter traces the history of the holistic (AKA "empirical") practices that are often ignored or criticized unfairly in most medical history texts.

Ultimately, books on history are written by the "victors;" that is, by the dominant political or medical paradigm, and such books give an inadequately accurate view of true history. The books written by Dr. Coulter are therefore a refreshing and even compelling review of medical history. Coulter's books show that what we call "scientific medicine" today isn't really scientific but "reductionistic;" that is, these conventional medical treatments tend to provide short-term a highly limited assessment of health benefits from treatment, often ignoring the fact that such treatments provided only short-term benefits while creating many side effects that later led to chronic and deeper diseases.

The four volumes are scholarly written and are thoroughly footnoted with references to thousands of original writings. Volume I describes the era from Hippocrates (400 B.C.) to Paracelsus (1600). Volume II discusses medicine in Europe from 1600 to 1850. Volume III covers medicine in America from 1800 to 1914. Volume IV covers Twentieth-century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era (this volume is itself separated into two volumes, Part I and Part II).

The title, Divided Legacy, refers to the two predominant schools of thought or traditions that have dominated Western medical history (college courses in "philosophy" typically describe these two dominant schools of thought, and Coulter's books describe how these two different philosophies manifest in medical thought and practice). Although the two schools were not formalized with every practitioner aligning him/herself with one or the other school, Coulter's analysis shows convincing evidence how some of the best physicians and healers believed and practiced mainly in one or the other tradition.

One school was known as the Rationalist school, while the other was the Empirical school. The Rationalist school sought to understand health, disease, and the treatment of disease in an analytical fashion; It sought causes of disease and methods of treatment in a systematic and rational manner. It focused on the anatomical and biochemical nature of the human being as ways to understand the parts of the organism and how to make them function properly.

The Empirical school of thought held different assumptions about the ways of acquiring knowledge on health, disease, and the treatment of disease. It did not look for nor seek to understand the causes of disease. It sought and developed ways that worked whether or not the practitioner understood at first why the methods worked. Although Empirical practitioners usually had theories on how and why their methods worked, they recognized that their theories were always secondary to the fact that the method worked. Over long periods of time and through close observations, empirical practitioners developed their own time-tested and systematic health practices that were not based on an analytical understanding of cause and effect.

The Rationalist school, of which modern medicine is the latest develo...

By REPPARE at Brownstone dot org.

The G20's High Level Independent Panel (HLIP) on pandemic preparedness convened through 2025 to provide a report entitled Closing the Deal: Financing our Security Against Pandemic Threats to the November G20 Leaders' Summit in South Africa. The report was as a follow-up to the HLIP's 2022 report on A Global Deal for our Pandemic Age where the panel outlined their financial estimates for pandemic preparedness and response (PPPR). In the face of funding cuts for development assistance for health (DAH), the 2025 report was intended to reiterate the necessity of its financial request and to increase the pressure on all countries to allocate more public money to save humanity from the scourge of pandemics. As noted by the HLIP:

"pandemic risks continue to rise – fuelled by our connected world, zoonotic spillover, humanitarian crises, and the increasing likelihood of both accidental and deliberate threats. Outbreaks emerge ever more frequently…" (HLIP, p. 9).

Indeed, it would seem a good cause, but a recent report from REPPARE at the University of Leeds finds quite the opposite. The problem with the statement, as we summarize in the report and here, is simply that it is disconnected from the world in which the G20 operates. Policy, at least good policy, must be based on reality.

The Risk of Pandemics

A "connected world" indeed allows certain pathogens to spread more quickly, but with no real difference in expected outcome. New variants of influenza and other respiratory viruses have routinely spread across the world for well over a century – not necessarily a new problem. Global integration also ensures that these viruses avoid landing upon large populations with complete lack of immunity. In other words, the catastrophes of measles and smallpox in the time of colonization of the Americas, Australia, or the Pacific Islands will not recur, at least not due to natural outbreaks.

Put simply, the big killers of the past will remain in the past. We have good yellow fever vaccines, smallpox is eradicated, we know how to avoid cholera, and antibiotics address bubonic plague and typhus as they would have also prevented most Spanish flu deaths. None of this is seriously challenged, with the greatest risk of reemergence due to either a major lack of access to known measures or from anti-microbial resistant strains driven largely by the inappropriate use of medicines. Will a new pathogen arise from natural spillover to cause a sudden, catastrophic global outbreak? SARs-CoV-2, the worst in a hundred years, was mainly a threat to the unwell elderly, and its origins look increasingly uncertain.

Will they arise from a laboratory? Perhaps, but that is another story with a very different prevention strategy. A strategy completely ignored in the 2022 HLIP report on financing PPPR and with just a brief mention in its latest 2025 report (perhaps a weak, but newfound acceptance of laboratory escape risks).

These days we 'see' outbreaks like MERS, SARS, avian flu, Nipah virus, and Zika because we can detect them. Before 1980, we simply did not have the major methods to do this – namely, PCR tests, genetic sequencing, point of care antigen, and serology tests. However, this oversight is almost undoubtedly the main basis for a rapid (or "exponential") increase in reported outbreaks (particularly in the mid-1980s after the invention of PCR) that drives the international pandemic agenda. It explains why this increase first happened in industrialised countries and only later in those that were technologically less developed. Not just the G20's high level panel, but reports from the World Health Organization and the World Bank ignore this reality in order to improve their chances of getting funding for PPPR from countries.

It is also possible to produce frightening estimates of the average number of people dying from pandemics each year – such as 2.5 million (twice total tuberculosis deaths). A US-based company, Ginkgo Biow...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org.

As the entire world is having a temper tantrum over the most recent Epstein case revelations about our discredited elites – obsessing over the power networks, the private jets, the bank accounts in the Virgin Islands, the French ministers, the European royalty, the foreign intelligence agencies, etc. – I'm having an entirely different epiphany. And, strangely, a flicker of hope.

The rot on display is hard to take your eyes away from, but I find myself thinking more about what might rise in its place. I'm not talking about another faction of whip-crackers wearing better suits or pushing slicker slogans, but a quieter bunch, who appear to have the capacity to generate moral assent to a new political formula. That new elite prototype has started to take shape inside the MAHA movement. It might not yet be a fully formed counter-elite, but it certainly looks like a promising kind of one.

I cannot say it enough: MAHA's foundational event is the Covid crisis. For many people, it represents the most frightening moment of our existence. What happened between 2020 and 2022 was not merely a policy disagreement or a partisan shouting match. It was the moment when the state, legacy media, Big Tech, pharmaceutical giants, and a large segment of the professional class all eagerly agreed that the normal rules no longer applied, that they could do virtually anything they wanted to people's bodies, force any injection into children's arms, arbitrarily decide who would be allowed to earn a living, and that these acts were not merely permissible but morally required.

The violation was so deep that it felt physical. That visceral reaction many of us felt – and continue to feel – was the ultimate offense to what George Orwell called common decency, by which he meant the basic virtues of ordinary people, as opposed to ideologues or men of power.

The closest Orwell came to a definition appeared in his 1944 review essay Raffles and Miss Blandish, where he contrasted two literary works, E.W. Hornung's Raffles series and James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Raffles, the gentleman burglar (a kind of British Arsène Lupin), operates by an unspoken code defined by the very simple injunction that "certain things are 'not done,'" and the idea of doing them scarcely arises. Devoid of religious belief or a formal ethical system, he follows certain rules semi-instinctively.

To give but one example: Raffles will not abuse hospitality, meaning that he may commit burglary in a house he is invited to, but never against the host. He never commits murder, avoids violence, is "chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women," and is intensely patriotic (dispatching to the Queen, in one telling moment, a gold cup stolen from the British museum on the day of the Diamond Jubilee). His code is one of social form rather than absolute right or wrong.

By contrast, James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Orwell has noted, flatters the reader's "power instinct," offering escape not into action but into cruelty and sexual perversion. It is a novel where the thrill lies in domination.

Orwell saw the fork in the road right there. One path preserves a world where wonder is possible. The other, obsessed with certainty, leads straight to the managerial class we spend our days despising – not because they are powerful, but because they are indecent. They don't merely want to govern; they want you to thank them while they humiliate you. They demand that you internalize your shame while they play with your body and with your children's minds. They regulate your speech, your sleep, your very immune system, and integrate the results of their experiments on you as data into their dashboards and compliance metrics.

That indecency has been the real fuel behind the populist insurgency which crystallized into political dividends around 2015. The anger was legitimate. The sense of betrayal was deep. But most of the m...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org.

The US government is now committing tens of billions of dollars to global health through a growing web of bilateral agreements branded as the "America First Global Health Strategy." These deals are pitched as a way to protect Americans from infectious disease threats by strengthening surveillance and outbreak response overseas.

As of early 2026, the State Department reports that 16 bilateral global health memoranda of understanding have already been signed representing more than $11 billion in US commitments, with officials signaling that dozens more agreements are planned—a scale that makes the absence of a clearly articulated strategy increasingly hard to justify.

To understand what is happening, and why it persists even as US health care at home remains deeply dysfunctional, it helps to separate two questions that are usually blurred together: what this strategy actually is, and why the United States continues to pursue it.

Start with the "what." The America First Global Health Strategy is an operating model that emerged after the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization and needed a way to remain active internationally without WHO governance.

Instead of working primarily through multilateral institutions, the US is now signing five-year bilateral health memoranda with dozens of low- and middle-income countries, overwhelmingly in sub-Saharan Africa. These agreements bundle longstanding programs on HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and surveillance into large government-to-government compacts, often involving hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars.

In substance, this is continuity more than rupture; what has changed is the structure. NGOs and multilateral intermediaries are being sidelined. Funding is routed more directly to partner governments. Co-investment and "self-reliance" are emphasized rhetorically. And the whole enterprise is framed as national self-protection: stopping outbreaks abroad before they reach American shores.

As an administrative response to WHO withdrawal, this makes sense. The United States still wants access to disease intelligence, laboratory capacity, and early warning signals. It still wants influence over procurement markets and health ministries in strategically important countries. Bilateral agreements are the simplest way to preserve those channels without returning to Geneva.

What is missing is strategy in the proper sense of the word. There is no public prioritization of threats. No explanation of which pathogens matter most to Americans. No ranking of countries by risk rather than need. No serious comparison between overseas spending and alternative investments in domestic surveillance, ports-of-entry screening, or health system resilience. Instead, almost any global health expenditure can be justified after the fact as "protecting Americans."

That brings us to the "why." Why does Washington keep expanding global health spending when US health care at home is such a mess?

The first answer is political economy. Fixing US health care means confronting powerful domestic interests: hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical pricing, state licensing regimes, professional guilds, and entitlement politics. Every lever is contested. Every reform produces visible losers. Global health spending, by contrast, sits largely outside domestic distributional fights. It is appropriated quietly, administered bureaucratically, and justified as either humanitarian or security spending. Politically, it is easier money.

Second, US global health programs function as foreign policy tools as much as health interventions. For decades, HIV/AIDS and malaria funding has anchored diplomatic relationships, sustained US presence in fragile states, and shaped procurement and regulatory norms. That logic did not disappear when the US left the WHO. It simply moved into bilateral form. Health MOUs now serve as instruments of influence in regions where Washington does not wa...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

Gardiner Harris's new book No More Tears, the Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson is scarier than any horror movie you'll see this year.

I imagine myself facing a skill-testing question, on a topic I know a lot about, prescription drugs: Which American pharmaceutical company holds the record for the most criminal and civil penalties related to illegal marketing and fraud?

I guess, hmm, maybe Pfizer? I say that because I remember a US judge once called Pfizer a "recidivist" organization that routinely breaks the law, pays fines, and then goes out to break the law some more. Pfizer's $2.3 billion fine (the largest health-care fraud settlement in history) for marketing drugs for off-label purposes, is only slightly more than Johnson & Johnson's settlement of $2.2 billion for illegal marketing of Risperdal and related drugs.

However the overall winner of the highest volume of criminal or civil penalties for deceptive marketing, kickbacks, fraud against public health programs, and ripping off Medicare/Medicaid, goes to that American of all companies, Johnson & Johnson. J&J has paid an estimated $8.5 billion in marketing-related penalties across multiple cases, tied to illegal promotions, fraud, deceptive marketing and Pfizer is a distant second at $3.4 billion. It helps to remember those fines are only paid after they get caught, mostly in cases that have woven their way through an obstacle course of delay, obfuscation, negotiation, secret settlements, and sometimes excruciating waits by patients and families hoping for some recognition and compensation for the death or injuries experienced by their loved ones.

Why is this relevant?

Because the second biggest thing drug companies should be known for, after developing and marketing blockbuster drugs, is crime: committing it, trying to avoid punishment, and then only when forced to, paying for it. Those massive legal costs, of course, are ultimately paid by you, the pill-consuming public.

Johnson & Johnson's famous and well-respected reputation, built on iconic blockbuster brands such as Tylenol, Band-Aids, Baby Powder, and Baby Shampoo comes under direct fire in Gardiner Harris's excellent new book No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson (Random House, 2025). He delivers an impressively-researched catalogue of fraudulent activities in the marketing of drugs and medical devices that are shocking in their brazenness and scope.

All major pharmaceutical companies spend substantial amounts of money to defend themselves against litigation, partly because their constant and inventive levels of lawbreaking are an essential part of their business model. Resolving US Department of Justice allegations of off-label marketing, kickbacks, and violations of the FCA (False Claims Act) is a very expensive line item and in that category, Johnson & Johnson leads as well.

"Between 2010 and 2021 J&J spent $25 billion on litigation, a number that is likely higher than that of any other company in the Fortune 500."

As Harris writes: "Johnson & Johnson has long been one of the biggest individual patrons of corporate law firms in the world." A company this big and this powerful eventually skews how law is actually practiced in the US, and helps explain why so many drug companies find it more rewarding for their shareholders to break the law than to follow it.

What this means on the ground is that any law firm in the US hungry to build their own enterprises would much rather represent Johnson & Johnson than work prosecuting them. For example, even though J&J's illegal marketing caused tens of thousands of boys to be permanently disfigured and resulted in the premature deaths of thousands of dementia payments (related to the antipsychotic Risperidal) none of the doctors who prescribed these drugs, the salespeople who bamboozled doctors, or the executives who orchestrated these illegal marketing schemes ever went to prison. If any law firm really pushed hard...

By Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone dot org.

At some point in our lives, we have our first experience with the "comfort cart."

The comfort cart, for those who are lucky enough to not yet know, is the cart of snacks and drinks that gets delivered to the room of someone who is actively dying in a hospital or nursing home so that friends and family have less of a reason to step away while awaiting the death of their loved one.

I will always remember my first experience of the comfort cart, as it arrived on the day of the death of my mother. Having spent two days in the ICU after the failed intervention following her stroke, I was repeatedly asked about beginning hospice care. When I finally saw signs of active death, I gave permission for the ventilator to be removed. Immediately the comfort cart appeared for us to facilitate the next three hours at the end of which she would die. Always prone to dark humor, I joked that it was a reward for removing the ventilator.

There is another memory I have of a comfort cart that strikes me with far greater sadness. I had been summoned some years ago to one of our local nursing homes for a woman who was actively dying. The nurse had called indicating the family had requested the final sacraments. When I arrived, the dying woman was unconscious alone in her dark room. The comfort cart stood outside of her room, completely untouched.

Troubled by this, I visited the nurses' station after completing the rituals for which I had been summoned, in order to learn what had happened. What she told me broke my heart; the family members visited only for a few minutes, and then on their way out told the nurse to call the priest because that is what she would want. They had no intention of returning.

My initial reaction to the events of 2020 was that we had collapsed civilization, but this story from prior to 2020 suggests that we were well on that path already. True civilization respects the reality that we will all die and obliges us to accompany the dying with certain rituals, both religious and non-religious. The progressive loss of these rituals with the apparent motive of avoiding thinking about death both set the stage for the Covid hysteria and was accelerated by it.

A Brief History of Funeral Practices

I've repeatedly been struck not only by how radically funeral practices have changed in Catholic circles over the last century, but also by the loss of collective memory that prevents people from even realizing it.

My mother would repeatedly tell me about how my great-grandmother, after she had died and before her funeral, was laid out for viewing not in a funeral home, but rather for three days in what was at that point the living room of our home.

I was also aware that, for my grandparents' generation, the expectation was that viewing would occur at a funeral home (which were at that point basically converted large homes) according to the following three-day schedule: 7-9 pm, 2-4 pm, and 7-9 pm, and 2-4 pm and 7-9 pm.

By my childhood, nearly every viewing schedule had been abbreviated to a two-day schedule: 7-9 pm followed by 2-4 pm and 7-9 pm. I have many memories of my mother dragging me along on a public bus to these viewings. Often, we stayed for the entire two hours. At one of these I was quite popular because I happened to have a Walkman radio and I could relay to the family the progress of a Steelers playoff game which they were missing because of this obligation.

By the time I was ordained a priest in 2009, some funerals followed the two-day schedule, but those 7-9 pm times had become 6-8 pm. Others, however, only had one day of viewing at 2-4 pm and 6-8 pm.

The lockdowns of 2020 accelerated a decline that was already present in 2019. Increasingly, funerals were preceded by no public viewing at all or perhaps only an hour or so before the ceremony.

Also increasingly, families were opting out of taking the body to Church for Mass and instead were requesting a brief funeral service at t...

By Daniel Polikoff at Brownstone dot org.

The following is an excerpt from Daniel Polikoff's book, Apocalypse of the Modern Mind: Covid and the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The body qualifies as the original and paradigmatic piece of private property. Ownership rights to the body belong exclusively to the relevant individual soul, the identity of which the body is both physical vessel and visible insignia. This proprietary authority covers, as well, actions performed by the body. Actions express the will of the soul. Freedom—and therefore spiritual agency—is abridged when action is unduly coerced or restricted, as in the confinement and forced labor characteristic of slavery.

Still more primal, however, than coercion or restriction of physical activity is the instance in which some action is performed upon the body that the individual does not freely choose. Such represents, physically, psycho-spiritually, and politically, the most direct possible assault on the sovereignty of the individual because it most flagrantly robs the individual soul of its proprietary command over the physical vessel which belongs to that soul alone. As such, it represents a direct attack upon that freedom of will expressive of the spiritual identity of an individual; a direct attack, that is, upon the essence of one's humanity.

Vaccination, when compulsory or in any way coerced, falls into this category. Any vaccination program involving any degree of coercion (and the greater the coercion, the greater the offense) consequently amounts to an assault upon the human spirit. Inasmuch as the sovereignty of the individual human being inheres in the unalienable (or natural) right to bodily autonomy, coerced vaccination imperils the liberty integral to the spiritual marrow of humanity itself.

In this respect, coercive vaccination is—practically and psycho-spiritually—not unlike the institution of slavery, which today is recognized as an intrinsically dehumanizing practice. Because, however, compulsory vaccination involves an act performed directly upon the body (rather than confinement of that body, or compelling its labor), its violation of autonomy is of a distinct kind.

The more forceful, invasive, violent, and dangerous the deed performed upon the body, the more powerful the assault upon the sovereignty of the individual person. Corporal punishment of any kind violates the inherent dignity of human beings. Torture aims to break the human spirit by abusing the human body, crippling its form and impairing its function so it no longer so readily stands, upright, as vessel of immortal spirit. By contrast, forced injection entails— no blows landed upon the surface of the body—but penetration of the physical interior of the person. Coerced vaccination forces entry into the figurative as well as literal bloodstream of the unwilling subject.

Physically or physiologically, such penetration with the injection of an unnatural substance poses real danger, carrying the possibility of death, or irreversible life-altering injury. Denial of the very possibility of such outcomes is counterfactual, and represents (not science, but) the blend of willful delusion and superstition characteristic of a religiously charged ideological formation. Moreover, adverse effects may manifest immediately or long after the injection itself, multiplying the psychological trauma inflicted by coerced vaccination. While short-term reaction or lack thereof does provide a preliminary indication of whether or not the subject will be negatively affected, she can never be entirely confident that she has escaped unscathed. This naturally holds, too, of a parent deciding whether or not to vaccinate their child.

On a psycho-spiritual level, too, penetration into the interior of a person who does not wish to be vaccinated constitutes a peculiarly devastating form of violation. Insofar as unwanted injection effects alien entrance into the interior space phenomenologically experienced as the abode ...

By Jordi Pigem at Brownstone dot org.

"We are going to have fun," writes Jeffrey Epstein on December 7, 2009. This phrase is his reply to an email by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Science Advisor (and Scientific Advisor to Bill Gates), Boris Nikolic, who is making a list of "rising stars," many of them scientists, that they "should visit together."

By then, everyone must have known that Epstein was a notorious, convicted sex offender. He had been released from jail only a few months before, on July 22. He had been under investigation since 2005: federal officials had identified three dozen girls whom Epstein had allegedly sexually abused (after a controversial plea deal agreed by the US Department of Justice, he was only convicted of two crimes). Why would a high ranking official of Gates' Foundation want to organize meetings between Epstein and prominent scientists? If it was about money, surely they could find better-looking investors. What, eventually, were they "going to have fun" with?

One of the revelations of the latest batch of Epstein files is his strong interest in viruses, vaccines, pandemics, and mRNA. Two months after getting out of jail, he is writing about viruses, infectious diseases, and something he calls "My BIG idea."

Or, for instance, in January 2010, he was discussing mRNA and codons.

The latest batch documents of the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, released on January 30, consists of over 3 million pages, with many names redacted. A helpful simulation of Epstein's inbox has been created, fully searchable and giving access to the contents of over 7,000 emails. With keywords and patience the original documents can then be located on the DOJ website.

The trio Epstein-Nikolic-Gates also features prominently in a long agreement letter sent by Epstein to Gates. According to this 2013 document, Gates "specifically requested" Epstein to "personally serve as the representative" of Nikolic in negotiations over the termination of his work with Gates. The first section of this six-page letter states: "Mr. Gates acknowledges that Mr. Epstein has an existing collegial relationship with Mr. Gates in which Mr. Epstein received confidential and/or proprietary information from Mr. Gates." An analysis of its contents and wider implications can be found in a detailed article by Sayer Ji on Epstein, Gates, and "Pandemics as a Business Model."

In March 2017, two and a half years before Event 201, three years before Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the WHO, an email thread involving Gates and bgC3 (Bill Gates Catalyst 3, now Gates Ventures) speaks of "pandemic simulation."

A number of emails in the Epstein files speak of pandemic preparedness. One of them, from March 2015, explicitly invites to discuss "how to officially involve the WHO" for the sake of "co-branding" (it looks like the "product" to "co-brand" is a pandemic).

In 2017, an email from Boris Nikolic addressed to both Epstein and Gates (four years after the agreement letter about Epstein mediating the rupture between Nikolic and Gates) mentions "pandemic" as a key area for a Donor Advised Fund.

Nikolic was later named as executor in Epstein's will, signed two days before his death, officially by suicide, in August 2019. (As I'm writing this, a friend points out to me that according to Fortnite Tracker, a player with Epstein's username, littlestjeff1, was still playing, from Israel, in 2024…)

Epstein was a node in a large network of darkness, and the release of the files may be a threshold into it. In a video interview included in the release, Epstein tells Steve Bannon that he is only "tier-one," "the lowest level" of sexual predator. As researcher Whitney Webb has stated in conversation with James Corbett:

Jeffrey Epstein was as much a financial criminal as a sex criminal. There's a very particular reason why mainstream media only wants to talk about his sex crimes between 2000 and 2006. Jeffrey Epstein was also not an anomaly in the...

By Christine Black at Brownstone dot org.

"In November of 2020 I remember sitting on the trunk of my car, parked on the top level of the parking deck because it was one of the only places with no campus police surveilling us, and thinking what if…I jumped off? That's how bad it was. But then I thought that my mom would be so sad. That kept me from the ledge," said 25-year-old Houston Reese, who attended Biola University in Los Angeles County, California from 2019 – 2023, a county he said had one of the hardest lockdowns in the country during the Covid period.

"I was heavily depressed with what was taken from us, with the restrictions and with not being able to be with friends," he said. He feels like one of the lucky students, though, because outcomes for him could have been much worse.

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director James Redfield said in the summer of 2020 that far more teens and young people were dying of suicide and drug overdoses than from Covid. Doctors and epidemiologists who authored and published the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 advised against school closings, calling them a "grave injustice;" advocated for protection of very old and sick people; and advised that young and healthy people should continue normal life because they were at little risk from the virus. Since then, many scientists have agreed that panic, fear, and severe restrictions in young people's lives during the Covid period were mistakes and caused grave harms. Many others have remained silent.

And yet, recommendations against lockdowns for college students did not curtail mandates and restrictive policies that harmed them. College offers young people a time to question authorities, to explore new ideas, to have adventures with friends while socializing and bonding. Classical liberal arts education embraces the ideals of sharpening students' critical and creative thinking; provoking them to examine divergent perspectives; and teaching them to strengthen their oral and written arguments. Yet, during the Covid period, colleges and universities all over the country followed government and bureaucratic mandates while discouraging and even punishing students' critical thinking and questioning.

When Houston returned to school in fall of 2020, it felt like a ghost town to him with students working on classes online from their rooms. Students were forced to wear masks outside, he said, as campus police surveilled them. On the first offense, they were fined, and on the second, they were sent home, "as 19-year-olds," he said incredulously. He described regularly carrying snacks while walking outside, so he could remove the mandated face mask and breathe freely. Late one night, he visited outside with his cousin whom he hadn't seen in a long time. They sat about 15 feet apart, talking. A campus police officer approached to force them to apply the mask. They said they were eating.

"You're not eating consistently enough," the guard said. "Put the mask on."

Police banging on dorm room doors when college friends gathered; secret tip lines college administrators provided for turning in non-compliant fellow students; administrators barring students from leaving campus for months; teacher firings; student expulsions; shaming and bullying the non-compliant – Covid-era college students shared stories like these.

Face Masks While Cross-Country Running; Required Covid Shots

A cross-country runner, Houston described being made to wear the mask while running outside in LA County, but as soon as the team ran the two miles into Orange County, the rules changed.

"Coach would turn around and tell us we could take the masks off," he said. At the end of the 2020 school year, Houston, a Political Science major, dropped running, failed two classes, and almost lost his scholarship. He left campus for a while. Upon his return, vaccine mandates rolled out.

"I didn't feel the vaccine was necessary for me as a 20-year-old with a 34 resting ...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

Recent studies reveal a striking statistic: over the last decade, approximately 30% of primary care physicians have either retired or switched to non-clinical roles, leaving a notable gap in patient care. Something subtle has been happening in American medicine, and it's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. There have been no emergency declarations, no ribbon-cutting ceremonies, no breaking news alerts. No one has announced it officially. But if you pay attention—if you walk into clinics that once buzzed with conversation, if you notice how long it takes now to get an appointment, if you see how often a familiar nameplate disappears from a door—you begin to feel it.

The waiting rooms are quieter. Not calmer. Not healthier. Just quieter in a method that feels wrong. The type of quiet that doesn't signal relief, but absence. In one waiting room, a single flapping magazine page, picked up by a draft, was the only sound in an air thick with anticipation—a sensory cue that underscored the void left by dwindling doctor visits.

This isn't because people have stopped getting sick. Quite the opposite. Chronic disease has become a defining feature of modern life. Emergency departments are overflowing. Hospital beds turn over at a relentless pace. The acuity is higher, the complexity deeper, the margins thinner. And yet, in office after office—primary care clinics, specialty practices, community hospitals—something fundamental is missing.

In the midst of this absence, consider the story of Claire, a patient who had been under the attentive care of Dr. Smith for over a decade. Claire's health journey was one he understood deeply, knowing her medical history, family concerns, and even anticipating her questions before she voiced them. When Dr. Smith quietly left his practice, Claire found herself navigating a system where each new doctor barely skimmed her files, struggling to understand her complexities in short appointments. This disruption left her feeling unanchored, her continuity of care severed.

The doctors are not leaving in protest or anger. There are no picket lines. No manifestos. They are leaving the way exhausted people leave anything that has stopped making sense to them. Quietly. Without ceremony. One retirement notice at a time. One closed practice. One final day seeing patients, followed by a decision not to return. Sometimes the only sign is a piece of paper taped to a glass door: Practice closed. Thank you for your trust.

Civilizations don't usually collapse in dramatic fashion. They don't fall all at once. They erode. Slowly. Quietly. Function by function. And often, the earliest warnings aren't explosions or shortages, but absences—things that used to be there, reliably, and suddenly aren't.

When insects vanished from windshields, people noticed long before scientists quantified it. Such silence itself seemed unsettling. It seemed like a signal, even before anyone could explain what it meant. Medicine is experiencing its own version of that silence now.

For generations, the physician occupied a unique place in the social structure. Doctors were not merely service providers. They were witnesses. They saw people at their most vulnerable and followed them over years, sometimes decades. They remembered histories that didn't fit neatly into charts. They understood families, patterns, tendencies, and fears. They were often the only professionals who saw the full arc of a human life—from birth to decline—up close and without abstraction.

That role did not disappear because it lost value; it was simply replaced. It disappeared because it became unsustainable.

Over time, medicine was reorganized around efficiency, standardization, and scale. Each change made sense in isolation. Each was defensible. But together, they produced a system that no longer trusted the very people it depended on. Physicians were gradually transformed from professionals exercising judgment into operators e...